Bonds of Trust

I've been really bugged by the number of teachers who have been found to be having physical sexual relationships with students, breaking the bond of trust within which learning can take place.  This is a tangent indeed: the topic of people being allowed to have private lives outside of their employment has somehow fallen by the wayside and this begins to sound like a defense of people who don't know how to conduct themselves at work or at home.

It's largely the fault of the teachers and administration, though culpability cannot rest in the hands of a minor, formal social boundaries, such as those between between teacher and student, adult and child have dissolved.  Really shocking are the number of cases of female teachers involved with adolescent male students.

Students are allowed to have "crushes" on their teachers: a crush is an intense admiration and desire to be with the person to learn from them: the crusher wants the crushee to share his experience, knowledge, way of adapting to the world.  It is a natural relationship, like the parent-child one, and should be inviolable: i.e. the adult needs to be the adult in these situations.  "But she threw herself at me," are not words a real man uses, and certainly not a gentleman.  I don't know what to say about a female teacher and male student.  Bottom line: it just isn't done.

Why can't teachers be expected to be ladies and gentlemen in their professional lives, i.e. at school and in their dealings with their students and families?  Administrators have rigidity confused with professionalism when they hire people who work with children, and rigidity has no place in education, which is another soapbox on which I proudly stand.  The result of off-kilter hiring practices results in people who might present the "right" measurable image yet lack the necessary soul.

As a point of clarity, teachers and others trusted with people's lives are not and should not be held to  the highest standard in every part of their lives, only in those parts that might affect those with whom they work: basically, in vernacular terms, "I don't care what you do in your own time as long as it does not affect your job," still works when we have a common understanding of what is and is not "done."  Where, how, why, and when did that line blur?